Beauty: Schizophrenia as Poetry

The opening session of PSYCH 101 had Dr. Smith with his the class of 150 fresh-blooded freshman, listening to 6 written passages (the 6 courageous souls should be commended as some of them were outright tonguetwisters), trying to evaluate unaided the origin of each. After once through the class was asked to give their impressions. Answers varied greatly from modern poets, ancient philosophers and everyone in between. He then enlightened us that 3 of the passages were from modern poets, while the other 3 were from a man who was institutionalized for schizophrenia. He invited us to listen again and try to decode which were from which source. Knowledge that there were only 2 possible sources did not make this task one bit easier. As part of this class we are to participate in an online forum, discussion, questioning, evaluating, critiquing and even outright disagreeing with that which we are presented or read in our text.

The exercise brought me to this revelation, although only so two days later early in the morning after a great Friday night with some new brothers and sisters.

Beauty: Schizophrenia as Poetry
Who could have thought that the line between poetry and a mind in utter chaos could be so fine? Schizophrenia is a terribly complex disease of the mind, which strikes with little warning, and yet it, if only to the untrained ear, can sound with all the beauty, eloquence and marvel of poetry.

The A.D.A.M Medical encyclopedia defines schizophrenia as a complex mental disorder that makes it difficult to:

• Tell the difference between real and unreal experiences

• Think logically

• Have normal emotional responses,

• Behave normally in social situations

This all makes sense as poetry is about beauty, emotion and life. Poetry while it has its devices; is free from many of the constraints of much of the other types of acceptable literature. Poetry, to me, is a response to the world, a response to one's surroundings, one's emotions, one's passions and desires. Poetry is a window, not as words into the mind, but rather into the soul of one's being. Poetry isn't about logic, normal behavior, social acceptance, controlled emotion or even staying in a present reality. Poetry is more than just the words, as those with schizophrenia are more than just the disease. Poetry is unconstrained beauty in words and schizophrenia is a mind not aware of the pressures of society to achieve perfection, to be better, to jump higher, to run faster and to earn more.

Beauty is a harder concept to grasp than one would think. Beauty, not unlike poetry, is not objective but rather terribly subjective. What one considers pure radiance, another thinks as absolute rubbish, and another still surmises it as just mediocre at best and while schizophrenia is horribly shunned in our society due to our set of societal norms it doesn’t belittle the beauty that is the person with schizophrenia. We seen a brief glimpse of that beauty during this exercise for which I am grateful. We must remember to separate the person from the disease; we all live, we all die, we all carry the same intrinsic value; we are all created beautiful.